


remember me love (when i'm reborn)

by Schocker



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: 5+1 Things, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Kwami Swap, Temporary Character Death, and yet the pain continues, everyone in paris is that one aaron paul pic where hes like NOOOO anytime something happens to chat, yes the title is hozier lyrics im gay whats the problem
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:02:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24504325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schocker/pseuds/Schocker
Summary: The first time Marinette dies, it's raining.Ladybug and Chat Noir have been fighting Hawkmoth for a few years now, and the akumas are slowly growing more violent. It was only a matter of time before one of them was seriously hurt. The Miraculous Cure undoes the damage of akumas, but it can't undo the memories.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 14
Kudos: 129





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> adrien is ladybug and marinette is chat noir. i didn't change their names because i don't understand french and gender is fake anyway so who gives a shit. im here to make children suffer bitch
> 
> ladybug's costume is p much what adrien wears as lb in the show. chat noir's is more like 90s superboy like this [ here ](https://in.pinterest.com/pin/326722147945509809/) except all blacked out leather (except the gold belt) with her hair tied back in a messy ponytail. i hate that damn braid. let her have a cute pony.

The first time Marinette dies, it’s raining.

It’s also late – nearly three in the morning – and they’d been fighting the same akuma since midnight. She’s exhausted, and Ladybug across the way sags behind a chimney to catch his breath a moment. Her ears flatten against her head instinctively when the akuma roars, tail winding around her leg. They can’t keep it up much longer.

When she peeks over the top of the vent she’s crouched behind, she can see the akuma a few rooftops away. He’s deceptively scrawny for all the damage he’s wrought in the past few hours. He’s not as much of a talker as other akumas, but from what she’s managed to gather, he’s furious for being forced out of the gym at closing time, insisting he needs to be stronger.

Marinette does her very best to make sure she doesn’t blame the victims, because, of course, it’s not really their fault some maniacal terrorist takes their emotions and warps them into something awful.

Sometimes it’s hard to hang onto that attitude, though.

She makes eye contact with Ladybug across the way. He shakes his yo-yo in a way that indicates _Lucky charm?_ without her even being able to read his lips through the sheets of rain. She nods back to him. It’ll be the second Lucky Charm tonight, and she’s already used four Cataclysms. Plagg had not been happy the last time she needed him to recharge.

She takes a slow, steady breath, fighting off the fatigue seeping into her bones. Then, with a final decisive nod to her partner, she bolts from her hiding spot, smacking her baton into the vent as she goes with a cry, yanking the akuma’s attention over to her. She’s normally hard to spot in her all black outfit, but she’s making plenty of noise, batting into things as she runs and grunting as she leaps over rooftops.

“Gymfreak need Miraculous!” the akuma howls, effortlessly ripping out part of a fire escape to hurl at her. She curses and drops to a slide, the metal sailing over her head so fast she can hear the air displace around it. It smashes somewhere behind her, but she’s already on her feet running again.

 _“Lucky charm!”_ she hears faintly over her own thundering heart and the now torrential downpour. She picks up her pace, determined to give Ladybug the space he needs to concoct a plan. Another roar, another awful crunch, and she ducks into a roll, the top portion of a lamppost missing her narrowly. The roof she’s sprinting across is slippery, and she barely keeps her feet under her, quickly summoning and using her Cataclysm for the next piece of metal Gymfreak hurls at her. She’d have preferred to keep that on hand, but not being reduced to smear on the roof was more pressing.

“Chat!”

She skids to a stop, water sloshing around her feet to wheel around. Ladybug is holding, blessedly, what looks to be a long, spotted chain. Maybe the Lucky Charm had learned its lesson about the supremely unhelpful water bottle it supplied earlier.

Ladybug gives a grin she can see from a distance. “Let’s wrap this up, shall we, Minou?”

Despite the awful nickname, she can’t but grin back, leaping up and twisting over the top of Gymfreak while he fruitlessly takes a swipe at her. She sloshes to a stop one rooftop away from Ladybug, catching the end of the chain he tosses.

“On my mark,” he calls. “Ready…”

Gymfreak doesn’t wait, lunging forward, arms outstretched to grab at Ladybug. Marinette’s instincts flare, and she yanks Ladybug out of the way as hard as she can, so hard he whips by her entirely to the next rooftop with a yelp, skidding to his knees.

Following his path instead of keeping her eye on the akuma turns out to be possibly the worst mistake of her sixteen years of life.

Before she can even turn her head back fully, Gymfreak is on her. His hands, pressed together to make one sturdy fist, bear down on the top of her head so hard that in the fleeting moment of consciousness she has, she can hear the horrific _crunch_.

She hopes Ladybug doesn’t hear.

It hurts and then it doesn’t and then it does again, her eyes flying open to a pink haze. She blinks hard, her eyes adjusting slowly, and she doesn’t realize her hearing was gone until it comes back. There’s a sharp pain behind her eyes, almost blinding in its intensity.

“ –at? Chat? _Mari?_ Can you hear me?” Adrien never calls her by her name in the suit. Something must be bad.

She tries to say something, assure him she’s fine, ask if he’s okay, but it just comes out a strange, thick grunt.

It seems to be enough for Adrien, who practically deflates over her, his breathing shuddering. Crying. Why is he crying?

It’s raining. Still raining. Like when they were fighting Gymfreak.

Marinette jolts upright, fingers digging hard into Adrien’s shoulder as he supports her.

“The ‘kuma,” she manages, throaty and awful but intelligible.

“I got him, Chat, don’t worry,” Adrien reassures.

“Got him,” Marinette repeats, her shoulders slumping with relief. “I… what happened?”

 _“Christ,”_ Adrien breathes, dipping forward to bump his head into hers. “Christ, Marinette.”

His use of her full name along is enough to alert her that it was bad.

“He hit me,” she remembers suddenly, her voice coming out much smaller and younger than she wants. Her hand lifts to touch the crown of her head gently, like the wound is still there. Her head throbs like it is.

“Yeah,” Adrien croaks. “Yeah, he hit you. Right on top of your head. It was – Marinette…” The miserable way his voice trails off makes her arms work to feebly wrap around him. He’s shivering beneath her arms, even in the warm summer rain.

She beeps first.

“Bug,” she murmurs. “We gotta go.”

“You’re coming over,” he says, the words too desperate to be a command, but too sure to be a question.

She doesn’t think she could even find her own house right now. “Alright.”

Ladybug rises, partner cradled in his arms. Any other time she’d complain, demand he set her down, but she’s still so dizzy and her head throbs so fiercely that for once she just lets her head droop to press against his shoulder. The rain has settled to a drizzle.

“Don’t worry, Minou,” Adrien says softly. “We’ll be home soon.”

Home sounds nice, Marinette thinks faintly, head pounding and body aching. Even as Ladybug does his best to keep his movements gentle, every little jostle sends sharp pain shooting from the top of her head all the way down her spine. She fights hard to keep any noises from escaping. No need to worry him.

When they get to the bakery, she doesn’t even have to watch the way he toes open the hatch, hearing the little _snick_ that’s become so important to her. Just the little sound makes the throbbing in her head lessen. They drop down carefully. Adrien’s parents will be up soon.

“Eyes closed,” he warns, setting her on the chaise. “Spots off.”

Marinette does close her eyes, the pink still flaring brightly enough to sting. “Claws off,” she whispers, the green of her own transformation seeming duller than usual. Without the transformation to bolster her, she lists to the side and almost topples over. Adrien’s arms – strong, warm, dependable – catch her and ease her back until she’s lying down.

“Oh, Marinette.” Tikki sounds fretful, and her little paws press against Marinette’s cheek.

“Shit, kid,” Plagg says, sounding exhausted. She pries her eyes open to look at him, mustering her strength to hold out her hand. He flits to it more attentively than usual, staring up at her with glowing eyes. “You alright?”

“Head hurts,” she mumbles, letting her eyes slide closed again.

“No shit,” Plagg sighs. She feels him curl up in her hand and lets it drop to rest on her stomach. “Of course, sweetheart.”

 _Sweetheart_. She must look awful. He only calls her that when she really feels terrible.

“Mari,” Adrien murmurs. She could kiss him just for keeping his voice down. “I’m gonna get you some water and some painkillers. Okay? I’ll be right back.”

“Okay,” Marinette breathes back. Talking was too much effort. She’s outrageously grateful her pajamas stayed dry, because there’s no way she could muster the energy to change them.

She doesn’t hear him come back, but suddenly Adrien’s there, pressing a straw to her lips and coaxing her to drink. When she cracks her eyes open again, there’s an intense look on his face. His eyes keep flitting around, taking her in, like he’s never seen her before. When he catches her eye, he gives her a wobbly smile. It looks painful.

“Bug,” she says, her voice sounding strange to her own ears. “He… in the head. I know he did. And he was so strong.”

The smile slides off his face. She thought the smile was painful, but whatever this is is much worse. “Marinette…”

“Did I…?” Marinette can’t bring herself to spit it out.

Adrien stares at her. He doesn’t blink, but his lip trembles for a moment before stopping. She watches him blink back tears. He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. Seeing his face is enough. It feels awful to look at.

“Oh,” Marinette whispers.

“Only for a minute,” he says. He reaches up and brushes her hair from her face. His hand is warm and soothing. “Just one.”

Marinette’s not sure who he’s reassuring.

He has to help her back up to bed. Her limbs feel like jelly.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Plagg says. “Tikki’s magic isn’t a perfect fix for us. The chaos can’t be fully ordered.”

Marinette hums an acknowledgement. Tikki appears with pills in her little hands, looking as apologetic as Marinette’s ever seen.

“Don’t forget these,” she says sweetly. Adrien helps her take them, and if she wasn’t feeling completely wrung out, she might be embarrassed. But her head her too much and Adrien was so careful and so sweet that she accepts the help.

“School tomorrow,” Marinette murmurs.

“I’ll let you sleep as late as you can, Minou,” Adrien whispers, curling around her.

Before she can reply, she slips into a deep sleep.

* * *

The sleep she got, measly few hours that it was, does wonders for her. Instead of feeling like she’s been yanked out of the jaws of death, she feels merely exhausted. Adrien frets over her the whole walk to school, his eyes glued to her face still, and she tries not to get frustrated with his hovering. She can’t even imagine how she’d feel if their roles were reversed.

So, she lets Adrien fuss and hold the doors and keep her arm tucked in the crook of his. If it makes him feel better. And she’d be lying if she said it didn’t make her feel a little better as well. Her headache hasn’t faded, even with the next dose of painkillers, and her balance still feels wobbly. His support is comforting.

At school the next day, everyone’s talking about the fight. How people even managed to see it in the dark, through the rain, at three in the morning is beyond Marinette’s comprehension. If she hadn’t _had_ to be there, she definitely would’ve been in bed, asleep.

No one else seems to share her compunction. The class is abuzz with speculation when they arrive. Adrien carefully deposits Marinette in her desk next to Alya, who turns from Nino in a flash.

“ _Girl!_ I’ve been texting you all _night_ ,” she cries, leaning in hard to Marinette.

Marinette winces, her head pounding. “Sorry,” she mumbles. “I – headache. Bad one.”

Alya blinks then looks at Marinette like she’s just seeing her. “Oh _wow_. You look, uh, rough. Are you sure it’s not like a migraine or something?”

Marinette shrugs carefully. “I don’t know, but I was out of commission, like, all night.”

Alya frowns sympathetically, patting Marinette’s hand. A bizarre thought flashes through Marinette’s head, that she’d _never_ get to see Alya again, never have her pat her hand or grin at her secretively or gush about Ladybug and Chat Noir. It makes her dizzy enough that she almost doesn’t hear Alya speak again.

“–you feel better, girl. So, you didn’t hear about the akuma last night?”

“Um,” Marinette flounders for a moment, making fleeting eye contact with Adrien for just a moment. “I heard about it, uh, walking to school today. From… people,” she gestures vaguely, feeling foolish, but Alya nods vigorously.

“Everyone’s been talking about it,” Alya says sagely. “I couldn’t get any footage directly, but someone else did. Here, it’s on the blog.” She whips out her phone and has the Ladyblog pulled up with the video in a matter of seconds.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea,” Adrien blurts, wilting a little when Alya swivels her head around to balk at him. He flusters as he goes to speak again. “I just mean, with Mari’s headache and all. The screens might… be too much,” he says carefully.

The screens, Marinette thinks, aren’t the problem.

Alya actually hesitates, looking over at Marinette. “You can always watch it later,” she offers.

“No,” Marinette says suddenly. She can barely remember the incident at all, the events immediately before and after totally hazy. She wants to know what happens. She _deserves_ to know what Adrien had to see. “No, I’ll look.”

“Mari,” Adrien murmurs gently, but he sighs when Marinette looks at him. He knows better than to try and change her mind.

“Okay,” Alya says eagerly. She hits play on the video, turning the volume up a little. The screen does, actually, hurt Marinette’s eyes a little, and she squints to lessen the ache.

Alya cuts her eyes over, seeing the strain, and says, “Here, let’s just skip to the important bit.” She taps to near the end of the battle.

The rain is coming down so thick that it’s difficult to see. The bright red areas of Ladybug’s suit make him identifiable, but Chat – _she_ – barely appears at all. She doesn’t hear herself call Catalcysm, but she sees it flash, illuminating her for a moment. Ladybug’s Lucky Charm call is barely audible, and the bright flash that accompanies it knocks the white balance of the shot off for a few seconds. By the time it refocuses, Ladybug’s tossing Chat the end of the chain.

Adrien suddenly turns away, facing the front of the classroom, back ramrod stiff. Uneasiness churns in Marinette’s gut.

She watches her past self yank Adrien clear past her, foolishly watching after him. Gymfreak moves unbelievably fast, his hands rearing back and –

The camera shakes violently, and for the first time the person filming speaks. “ _Holy shit. Holy shit. He just smashed Chat Noir’s head open. Fuck. Oh my god. She’s… fuck.”_ He sounds older than her, but not by much. His voice trembles hard, and he fumbles to set his camera firm again. Even before he does, Marinette’s hair stands on end.

“ _Chat!”_ Ladybug’s cry, _Adrien’s_ cry, makes bile rise up in Marinette’s throat. It’s awful. Awful. She’d rather rip her ears out than hear it.

The camera steadies, the cameraman’s breathing still heavy and audible, and Marinette can only spare a blinding moment of relief that her form is much too dark to see on film. She thinks she might pass out if she sees her own brain spread across the roof.

Ladybug wraps up the fight in what feels like moments. A hoarse cry unlike any she’s ever heard from him echoes across the rooftops and Gymfreak is completely entangled in chains in seconds. Ladybug lunges to rip off the sweatband from his head and rips it savagely apart. He snatches the akuma, purifies it, and unravels the chain to heave it up as fast as he can.

The light washes over the rooftops, fixing all the damage, and Ladybug skitters over to Chat’s still prone form. She watches him hunch over her, hands flitting from her hips, her face, her shoulders, her forearms, with increasing desperation. She knows the moment she must have made him aware she was alive by the way he goes nearly boneless over her. The rest of the video is just – them. Holding each other. Until Ladybug stands up with Chat in his arms and bounds away.

There’s a brief moment in the last few seconds when the cameraman turns the camera on himself, looking deeply shaken. He _was_ young, maybe a year older than her and Adrien, and her stomach churns to see the tears in his eyes. _“I think she was okay,”_ he says uncertainly, and the video cuts out.

Marinette closes her eyes to keep from crying, pressing a hand to her lids to rub vigorously. She feels fingers ghost across her forearm on the desk and knows they’re Adrien’s.

“Marinette?” Alya’s voice is concerned.

She swallows the lump in her throat. Tears in her eyes she can excuse. The gulping, heaving sob clawing its way out of her lungs, less so. “I’m alright. Adrien was right.”

His hand tightens around her forearm, thumb stroking carefully.

“Screens were too much, huh?” Alya says soothingly, rubbing a hand down her back.

“Yeah,” Marinette breathes. “Too much.”

* * *

The speculation doesn’t stop for days. Marinette’s headache slowly starts to fade, Plagg goes back to being the cranky bastard he is, and Adrien doesn’t look at her like she’s going to die in front of his eyes.

( _Again_ , that weird part of her brain whispers. It’s been consistent since Gymfreak. But she’s fine.)

The media speculation doesn’t stop.

She doesn’t watch the video again, but the tweets, the talk shows, the youtube theories, _all_ of it just keeps going. If she’s really alive, if she’s okay, if she’ll be retired, if her miraculous didn’t work right, if, if, if. It’s… grating.

“We could just patrol a little while,” she whines, flopping into Adrien’s lap. He smiles down at her patiently. It makes her want to cram a pillow in his face, so she does.

“Is your headache gone?” he laughs, accepting the abuse.

She scowls. “Akumas won’t care if I have a headache.”

“They sure won’t,” he says cheerfully, bopping her on the nose like he does in the suit sometimes. It makes her wrinkle her nose all the same. “But _I_ care. And there’s no sense in unnecessarily making it worse. Just give it a few more days, Minou, and you’ll be right as rain.”

Marinette grumbles. “Why don’t you listen to people call you brain-dead for a few days, then we’ll see how _you_ feel.”

“I’m dating you, aren’t I?” he replies cheerfully, laughing harder when Marinette doubles down on the pillow cramming.

* * *

The akuma comes two days later. Marinette has to slip out of the Manor window while Nathalie’s not looking, which takes a few minutes more than she’d like. When she gets there, Ladybug’s already on the scene.

He grins at her. “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” he says loudly. She can hear the gasps of people in the street; some even start cheering for her. She has eyes only for her bright, dumb bug.

“Couldn’t leave you hanging, Bugaboo,” she drawls, flicking her baton out, grinning right back. “Ready to kick some ass?”

“Why, Chat Noir,” Adrien says, and it warms her down to her bones. “I would be delighted.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second time Marinette dies, it’s on live tv.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> marinette's terrible time continues. adrien's going to be a puddle of tears by the end :( he's sensitive

The second time Marinette dies, it’s on live tv.

The akuma, come three months after her death, was a man who lost his job as an electrical contractor. He was called the Hertzman.

Marinette’s not a hundred percent sure on how flinging bolts of lightning at people was going to fix his problem, but it seemed he wanted only to _“Bring the Hertz!_ ”

She’s rolled her eyes every time he’s said it.

As always, with the more dangerous akuma, people have cleared out much more effectively. Some of the lesser akuma don’t generate the same panic (Marinette half wishes that they would), but the moment the Hertzman started hurling around honest-to-god _bolts of lightning_ , people made themselves scarce. The news helicopters hovering a few hundred feet above them doesn’t seem to get the memo. Marinette’s not sure why, considering a few bolts have only _narrowly_ missed one of choppers already, but whatever. At least the Hertzman was focusing his attention on her and Ladybug.

They’ve identified the akuma (the wire stripper attached to his belt), and Ladybug has just summoned a rubber hose when it happens.

One of the choppers dips low suddenly, probably eager to catch the shot of the Lucky Charm, and the Hertzman’s eyes snap over to it. The chopper seems to realize its mistake, rising back up quickly, but the Hertzman has already locked on and reared back to launch the bolt.

There are, Marinette thinks in the fraction of a second she has, three options.

Option one, she allows the chopper to get hit, definitely killing everyone inside and possibly more wherever it crashes down. The Miraculous Cure will bring them back, but they’ll remember it all.

Option two, she takes the bolt and hopes to _god_ it doesn’t kill her, saving the civilians.

Option three, she takes the bolt and it definitely kills her.

The fact that option two is the best option is depressing, Marinette thinks morosely, flinging herself forward just as the bolt it released.

She’s never been electrocuted. That seems obvious to say, but it’s true. She has no idea what it will even feel like.

Initially, it’s like being hit by a train. A massive force smashes into her, seizing all her muscles and stealing her breath. She’s blown backwards off her trajectory, ricocheting off a building to plow into the street below. She barely even registers it. All she can feel is the unbelievable pain in her chest, like someone punched their way through her ribcage to wrap a fist around her heart and _squeeze_. It’s like lava is pouring out of her eyes, her ears, the tips of her fingers. She can’t breathe, she can’t move, she can’t _think_.

Ladybug appears for a moment, maybe, but her vision is blurred, and she can’t hear anything. He disappears; she wishes he would come back. She wishes Adrien were here.

She can _feel_ her heart _stutter, stutter_ , _stop_ , and the pain fades.

It jolts back into her, like the fist around her heart was pumping on purpose now, carefully. She jerks to awareness, hard enough that she flails a little, a lung-tearing gasp erupting from her. She gasps and coughs and chokes her way to awareness, tilted on her side with warm hands supporting her as she fights to suck in air. The sun beats down on her, feeling extra hot in the midafternoon.

“Ad – A –” she tries to call because she wants him, she _needs_ him there, but her muscles are still seizing and she can barely breathe.

“I’m here,” his voice is behind her. It’s trembling. Or maybe it’s just her. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.” Probably both.

She lets out another lung-rattling cough, feeling her limbs twitch painfully. “Get him?”

“Yeah, Minou, I got him,” he reassures. “You ready to move? I only have two spots.”

“I’m… I can’t.” She can’t even get her lungs and her tongue to formulate a sentence.

“I got you, Chat, don’t worry,” he mumbles. He sounds teary. Did she make him cry? She can be a terrible girlfriend sometimes.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, trying not to twitch and jerk her way out of his arms as he stands. She looks up at him as best she can and he’s looking down at her, lip doing that wobbling thing that always means he’s trying really hard not to cry.

“Don’t say sorry,” he chokes out. “ _Please_ don’t say sorry.”

She’s upset him even more, but for now she tucks her chin and hums an agreement/apology. Based on the way he squeezes her a little closer, he gets it. He bolts off and Marinette can glance over his shoulder to see the news choppers. They don’t pursue them like usual. Must be a thank you.

* * *

Being electrocuted is much different than having her head split like a melon. She doesn’t say it to Adrien, who’s been doing his best not to cry, but she does tell Plagg, who stops looking worried just long enough to snort.

“Yeah, I’ll bet it does, sweetheart,” he says drily. His snark is belied by the term of endearment that Marinette pointedly ignores.

When she’d woken from having her head split, her head (obviously) had hurt tremendously, and she’d been groggy and lethargic.

Electrocution is different. She’s less groggy, but the pain is less centralized in one place and more… _everywhere_. She supposes her chest hurts more than anything, but every single muscle in her body feels like someone is just holding it taut to a painful intensity. Every single movement sends pain shooting through her entire nervous system.

Not to mention the tics. Every minute or so, another muscle jerks extra hard and she jolts, flinching in whatever direction it pulls her. Adrien bursts back into his room with a heating pad and some lotion and water and she can’t even tease him about the incriminating set of tools he brings. The second he starts kneading at her forearms, Marinette thinks she’s going to cry. She even lets him coax her into slipping her shirt off so he can get at her back and relax the muscles around her lungs.

She’s facedown in her sports bra and leggings on the chaise, trying not to think too hard about her boyfriend perched over her and extremely grateful that his parents were so busy in the bakery downstairs.

“Your back muscles are insane,” Adrien murmurs, digging his fingers down her spine. “I’ll never be this jacked in my life.”

“I’ve seen your back, Adrien. You’ve got plenty of muscle.” She tries not to flush at the thought, and grins when Adrien laughs.

“Can you just let me thirst over your delts in peace, Mari?” he teases, digging his knuckles into her shoulders so hard she squeaks. His hands pull back immediately, resting in the middle of her back. _“Sorry_ , sorry, I didn’t mean to push so hard.” He sounds genuinely worried and apologetic. _Ugh_.

She’s well aware it must have been awful to watch her die a _second_ time in a few weeks, but he’s doing his best to keep his cool for her. Her makes her heart pound harder.

“Um, your pulse is still kinda intense,” Adrien murmurs worriedly, pressing a littler closer to her heart.

Marinette, before she can talk herself out of it, wriggles around until she’s on her back, hands clamped around his thighs where he’s kneeled around her. “Maybe has something to do with my very hot boyfriend literally on top of me.”

Adrien flushes red but it only takes a moment for a rakish grin to appear on his face. He leans in, waggling his eyebrows. “So, you think I’m hot?”

“Ugh!” Marinette has to fight a smile to scowl, shoving a hand to his face and knocking him off her to the ground. “I’m putting my shirt back on you weird, horny bug.”

Adrien pokes his head up enough to press his face into the cushion and whine, _“Nooo_. At least let me admire your biceps.”

Marinette laughs; it makes the muscles in her chest jerk and suddenly she’s heaved over in a coughing fit. Adrien’s there in a blink, hand smoothing down her back and letting her fist her hands in his shirt, bracing against him. The fit subsides and she’s completely, _humiliatingly_ out of breath.

“Mari? You alright?” Adrien’s hands haven’t stopped their slow ministrations. She hopes they never do.

Marinette manages a feeble nod, still trying to reign in her breathing.

“Oh, Marinette,” he breathes, and there’s something about the way it sounds that suddenly makes tears spring to her eyes. Her breathing hitches against a sob, and Adrien ducks down to hold her close.

Her crying doesn’t last long (because it doesn’t help; it never does – she learned that after her mother died), and soon she’s trying to suppress embarrassing little hiccups. She takes a shuddering breath, opens her mouth to say –

“Don’t say sorry,” Adrien mumbles, his voice thick. He’s always a sympathetic crier. He pulls back to run his thumbs under her eyes. “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

“I didn’t mean to…” she gestures vaguely at her face.

Adrien looks pained. “Marinette, I know that… jokes and being silly, they’re how you – you _deal_ with things that are hard for you. I know. I get it. I’m trying to help, but… sometimes you just have to cry. Let it out. You’ll feel better for it.”

She huffs and ducks her head, scrubbing at her eyes. “But I hate crying.”

“I know you do,” he responds warmly, pulling her hands away to kiss her on each lid. It kind of makes her want to cry again. “But consider this: you’re about to take the fattest nap of your life.”

She laughs then, strained and nasally but real. “Can you get the fuzzy blue blanket?”

“Oh, baby.” He grins. “It’s already in the drier getting warmed up for you.”

“I love you,” she moans, slumping into his embrace again.

“I love you, too, Marinette.”

* * *

The footage is awful.

She waits until she’s home to watch it, unwilling to subject Adrien to it again. She can still feel the lingering guilt for the first time in class. Plagg squints at her uncertainly when she pulls up the news footage, but all he does is ask for more cheese.

She finds the clip, swallowing hard when the _Viewer Discretion Is Advised_ warning flashes beforehand. She skips through most of the fight, unable to keep her hands from shaking.

 _“ –has been going on for thirty minutes now.”_ The reporter in the chopper points, her finger just visible at the edge of the frame as she gestures down at the Hertzman. _“Ladybug and Chat Noir seem to have formulated a plan.”_ The flash of the Lucky Charm.

 _“Let’s try and get a better look, Marc,”_ the reporter suggests, and Marinette’s stomach sinks as she watches them dip lower. The moment the akuma’s attention locks onto them, the reporter speaks again, sharp and panicky. _“Back up, back up, back up!”_

Of course, they don’t make it in time. Marinette watches her own head swivel back and forth from the helicopter to the akuma and then her lunge off the roof she’s perched on.

The bolt, like she figured it had, blasts her backwards, smashing through the corner of a building and then into a crater in the ground below. The initial blast and impact aren’t really so bad – she’s watched footage of herself blown all across Paris a hundred times by now – but the moments after the dust settles makes her chest clench painfully.

She’s half curled on herself. It almost looks like she’s seizing, the way she’s jerking around. The camera zooms into her face and the pain is so obvious Marinette has to look away, breathing deeply for a few seconds. She hears Adrien scream for her again and slaps her hand on the keyboard to pause it, breathing carefully.

“Kid?” Plagg’s voice is cautious.

“I’m good,” she breathes, even if she maybe feels like she isn’t. “Just… needed a second.”

“You don’t have to watch this,” Plagg says slowly. She’s still staring out her window, but she feels him float up to curl against her neck. “… do you need me to call your bug?”

“No.” The denial is rushed, probably too rushed. Plagg doesn’t say anything. “No, it’s okay. I don’t want him to have to live through this again.”

“Well,” Plagg says. “You also lived through it, Sweetheart.”

Something bizarre bubbles in Marinette’s chest and it takes her a moment to realize it’s a laugh, but when it comes out it doesn’t really sound… right. “I mean technically,” she starts, then trails off into more strange sounding giggles.

Plagg sighs, loud and dramatic, but presses tighter to her, a purr starting to rumble off him. “That’s terrible, kid, your jokes are almost as dead as you were.”

She _really_ laughs then, and it sounds a little less weird, but the laughter fades quickly. All she hears for a few moments is Plagg’s purring and her own freakishly loud pulse. It’s felt loud and strange for the past few hours, even after Adrien reluctantly let her slink home in the dark.

(The only reason she bothers coming home at all is because she knows Pére joins her for breakfast on Wednesdays. It’ll be the one time she can’t get away with just hiding out at Adrien’s.)

She glances back at the screen. It’s split now, one half focused on her own writhing form, and the other half focused on Ladybug’s distraught face as he spots her. She lingers on his face so long a lump grows in her throat and her laptop tries to go to sleep. She hits play again.

 _“Chat Noir is down, I repeat, Chat Noir is down.”_ The reporter sounds harried now. _“Just as the akuma took aim for us, Chat Noir put herself between us and the bolt. She looks to be badly hurt.”_

The Hertzman is between them, but Ladybug doesn’t hesitate, tearing off and smashing a fist into his face as he passes, knocking him over. It almost surprises Marinette. As Chat Noir, she’s usually the more hands on with her staff, while Ladybug hangs back to fight more creatively.

 _“Ladybug has reached Chat Noir, seems to be checking on her condition_.” The reporter’s voice is shaky. “ _The akuma remains downed for the moment.”_

She can _see_ the indecision on Ladybug’s face. He presses an ear to her chest and his face twists into something that hurts just to look at. She’s still twitching. He presses a hand to her face for a moment and then tears off back to the Akuma.

The screen splits again. One shot lingers on her still spasming body (body, _body_ because she _died_ ), the other following Ladybug.

He scoops up the rubber hose he dropped and dodges through the blasts thrown his way, using the hose like a whip to snatch the wire stripper without the metal tool zapping him.

_“The akuma has been purified, and the Miraculous Cure has been used.”_

Ladybug is back by Chat Noir’s side in an instant, almost beating the wave of the cure.

 _“Char Noir is conscious,”_ the reporter breathes, sounding more relieved than Marinette ever thought she would. She watches herself choke and flail on the ground, and Ladybug – _Adrien_ – has tears in his eyes that are visible even from a distance. It makes her feel awful and small. _“They’re leaving the scene now. This has been Newsca–”_

Marinette pauses it again, staring at the retreating figures of Paris’ heroes.

“Kid? Should I call your bug?” Plagg asks again.

Marinette swallows hard. Her hands shake and she crams them under her legs. “Yeah.”

* * *

Breakfast the next morning is as stilted and awkward as ever. Her pére doesn’t say anything besides a terse _good morning_ and _have a good day_ at the beginning and end of the meal. She convinces the Gorilla to let her walk today, and he follows from a distance without comment as she veers towards the Agreste Bakery.

She barely walks in to greet Emilie with a smile when Adrien comes crashing down the stairs, backpack haphazardly thrown on and clothes askew, beaming when he sees her.

“Mari!” he cries cheerfully, sweeping her up into a big hug and spinning her around. It makes the weird weight lingering in her chest lighten a little. “I missed you!”

She laughs, cheeks burning when she hears Emilie laugh as well. “You saw me yesterday, nerd,” she teases.

“Ugh.” Adrien sets her down with a pout, exaggeratedly buckling his knees so they’re closer to eye level. “But that was _hours_ ago.”

“Alright, children,” Emilie says warmly, holding out a back of sweets for Adrien to take, which he gladly does. “You’ll be late if you stall.”

“Thanks, Maman,” Adrien says, draping an arm of Marinette and dragging her along playfully.

“Have a good day,” Emilie calls after them. It’s exactly what her pére said to her, but it feels completely different. Marinette tries not to think about it as Adrien drags her along, laughing at his fumbling.

“Sorry,” he laughs. “I’ve had, like, a _lot_ of coffee this morning.”

Marinette doesn’t say anything, just glances up at him. He elaborates at her look.

“Well.” He clears his throat, clearly trying to remain jovial. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

Marinette glances away but winds her arm around his waist and tugs him close. He squeezes her shoulders and presses a kiss to her head.

“How about you? Sleeping okay?” he asks gently.

The nightmares come and go, but most nights she takes sleeping meds so she won’t dream. She hasn’t told him yet. “I was so exhausted last night I slept for ten hours,” she admits, which is true. Tonight will be the real challenge.

“Good,” Adrien says firmly. “You deserve the rest.”

* * *

Alya practically yanks Marinette out of Adrien’s arms when they get to class; Marinette watches Adrien bite back a reprimand when she winces at the jostling. The soreness in her chest hasn’t really subsided and Alya’s normal manhandling is a little intense.

There’s no greeting besides, “That fight yesterday was _crazy_!”

Marinette had made sure to actually _respond_ to Alya’s texts yesterday. Luckily, with something so dramatic, Alya’s doing most of the talking anyway, and Marinette just needs to acknowledge her.

“Yeah,” Nino agrees, nodding so vigorously his glasses slip down his nose. “I’ve never seen Ladybug just fuckin’ _deck_ an akuma like that.”

“Well, he was worried about Chat Noir,” Marinette defends nervously, eyes cutting to Adrien. His mouth is in a tight line, but otherwise he looks fine. Appropriately grim for the subject, maybe. “So, y’know.”

“And the reporter’s video!” Alya crows. “Man, I thought she was gonna cry.”

The video was posted on the reporter’s twitter, a two-minute clip of her personally thanking Chat Noir and apologizing for being the cause. She let Adrien reply on Ladybug’s twitter to reassure her.

> ( **Ladybruh** @miraculousspots
> 
> @aimeebisset thank you for your concern. clearing the area of all civilians makes our fight much easier. we’re glad everyone is okay)

“I wonder why Ladybug replied and not Chat Noir,” Nino muses.

“She’s probably recovering,” Alya says, suddenly very serious. “I mean, you saw how hard she got blasted.”

Marinette turns her head briefly, pretending to glance out the window and trying not to let her throat close up like it wants to. She can’t cry. That would be suspicious.

Adrien’s knuckles bump against her knee under her desk. She musters a weak smile for him that he returns with the same enthusiasm.

“That was crazy, dude,” Nino sighs. “I hope she’s okay.”

“Chat Noir’s one tough kitty,” Adrien says, real amusement flickering in his eyes. “She’ll be alright.” His knuckles rap on her kneecap.

“Definitely,” Alya agrees. The utter faith in her voice kind of makes Marinette want to cry again. “She was alright last time, right? She’ll come back out when she needs to.”

“You’re right!” Nino says, cheered by his girlfriend’s words.

Marinette’s hand drifts to her chest thoughtlessly, massaging at her heart. Suddenly, listening to Alya and Nino talk about her, feeling Adrien’s fingers pressed to her leg, the pressure in her chest isn’t quite so bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> adrien: i heard that marinette has an eight-pack
> 
> marinette: stop
> 
> adrien: that marinette is _shredded_
> 
> thats 2 upsettingly violent ends, only three more to go. i believe in u mari u got this


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The third time Marinette dies, it’s four days after her seventeenth birthday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back at it again with more awful times. marinette's coping skills get worse. adrien gets more stressed. we're gonna have to talk about it sometime...

The third time Marinette dies, it’s four days after her seventeenth birthday.

It’s also only two weeks after her last one. At this rate, she’ll be dead again in a few days.

And really, she would’ve been fine if the bus had hit her and that was all. The real problem comes after the akuma, Traffic Jamz, swings the bus over to her, knocking her well over a few hundred feet in the air. Her baton was gone, lost somewhere in the wreckage of cars on the bridge, and she was knocked directly out over the water.

Still, the _biggest_ problem, really, is not getting hit by the bus, nor getting flung in the air with no baton to help catch her. The _biggest_ problem is falling _down_ from that several hundred feet she’s been flung and smashing into the water face first after an uncontrolled fall.

The blow sends her vision black for a moment, the pressure bearing down on her immense. When her vision clears, it’s still painfully dark and murky. She can barely tell which way is up. Her chest burns hot, hotter than she thought possible, so hot she half expects the water around her to start boiling. She tries to swim where she thinks is up, but limbs are so slow, so heavy. Her struggle makes her burn all the hotter, spreading down to her stomach, through her limbs, blasting out of her ears. She can’t tell how close the surface is, how far.

She inhales.

It’s somehow even worse than before.

She’s choking, heaving, but there’s no air at all, and her limbs grow leaden. She’s drifting now, maybe up, maybe down, maybe not moving anywhere at all and it hurts. It hurts worse than anything. When the darkness smothers her again, she’s grateful.

She jerks back to awareness, lungs still burning, but limbs bursting with renewed vitality. She claws her way up as hard as she can, trying to utilize her strength before it’s gone again.

When she bursts above the surface, she’s heaving and choking immediately, tears obscuring her vision. She paddles in place, trying to find where she is, where to go, when she hears someone over the roaring of her ears.

“Chat Noir!” It’s not Ladybug, not her Adrien, but it’s _someone_. “Here, Chat Noir, grab this!”

Something bumps her arm and she latches onto it, redirecting all of her energy to the grip on the pole that nudged her. She grips harder when whoever is on the other side has to haul her out of the water and over a railing. Several pairs of hands grab onto her as soon as she’s in range, and she didn’t realize she was so cold until she feels their hot hands on her.

She’s settled onto the deck, barely propped up on her hands and knees when she starts gagging up river water. “Gross,” she grinds out, then heaves some more.

There’s faint laughter around her, kind of hysterical, and something warm covers her back. She glances over to find a man, maybe her father’s age, draping a blanket over her shoulders.

“Are you alright?” he asks, brow furrowed with concern.

“I’m feline fine,” she croaks out without thinking, and it startles a laugh out of the man. Adrien would be proud.

Adrien.

She heaves herself up to sit on her haunches, casting a look around for her partner.

“Ladybug’s coming,” another crew member says from the bow of the boat, pointing at the rapidly approaching red blur flying over the river. It only takes another few seconds for him to land on the boat.

“Chat,” he breathes, and everyone backs out of the way immediately for him to run to his partner.

If she thought the crew members hands were warm, Ladybug’s hug is like stepping into fire. It’s hard to discern how the water in her lungs had been so hot and painful while Adrien’s arms are even hotter but comforting.

A beep separates them, and she frowns at his earrings. There’s only a single spot left.

“You’re out of time,” she murmurs.

His brow furrows, crinkling his mask. “We can make it.”

“Bug.” Marinette presses a hand to his chest. “I’m alright. I’m okay.”

He looks torn. Another warning beep, like Tikki was _really_ urging him now. “Alright. Alright.” He hugs her again tightly for a few seconds and presses a kiss behind her ear. It’s more affectionate than they usually are in costume, but she doesn’t care much about that right now. “I’ll be right back, Minou. _Right_ back.”

“Go on,” she mumbles, shoving weakly at him. He gives her one more nervous look, then blasts off the boat. He barely even makes it – even as he vanishes over a rooftop, obscuring him from sight, the flash of pink is faintly visible.

She crumples in a little on herself, her breathing thick and ragged. He always gets so worried. Better not to let him see just how much pain she’s in, otherwise he’d never leave her side.

The man who gave her the blanket tentatively rests a hand on her back, like he’s not sure if it’s allowed. When she doesn’t protest, he lets it rest more firmly. It kind of feels like it’s keeping her from floating away.

“Um, here, I brought you some tea,” a crew member says as he walks up. He’s younger than most of the other men, a few years older than Marinette.

“You d-didn’t have to,” Marinette tries to protest, but her teeth start chattering, making her hard to understand.

“It’s best to warm you up inside and out,” the older man explains. “Thank you, Michel.”

Michel ducks his head, looking flustered, but makes eye contact and nods at Marinette. She blinks and accepts the tea from him with shaking hands. She hadn’t even realized she _was_ shaking.

_(Just like when you were electrocuted, the crushing pain in your chest, the agonizing twitching and jerking–)_

“I’m Tom,” the man introduces himself, and it jerks Marinette to awareness again. She has to stare down at her tea for a moment. A stranger named Tom has provided more comfort for her in the past few minutes than her father Tom has in years. It’s almost as sobering as the fact that she just died. Again.

“Thank you, Tom,” she manages, taking a sip from the tea. It soothes her throat and wrings a chill out of her. How she could be so cold when she was so hot only minutes earlier is a mystery.

“It’s the least we can do for you, Chat Noir,” he says humbly. “You’ve had a few… nasty spills lately.”

She can’t help but snort. “No shit,” she says thoughtlessly. Plagg’s a terrible influence.

Michel snickers a little until Tom cuts a glare over at him. Embarrassment flushes through Marinette.

“No, you can laugh. Sorry, I’m just…” She grips the mug tighter. “It’s been a rough few weeks.”

“Of course,” Tom agrees, almost soothingly.

“How’d you even get out this far?” Michel asks tentatively.

Marinette cranes her neck to find that the bridge is quite a ways away now. “You didn’t see?” she asks, to cover for the fact that she’s scrambling to recall it herself. Her disorientation hasn’t faded.

“We saw you, um, hit the water,” Michel says uncertainly. “It looked really painful.”

“Michel,” Tom scolds lightly, but Marinette waves her hand with a smile.

“Yeah. Way more than the bus that hit me first,” she says, pleased that the fact rolls off her tongue without much effort. Her scrambled brain is starting to realign itself again.

“A bus?” Tom repeats while Michel gapes at her. When she nods, his face falls into something upset, and Tom’s hand presses a hand to his mouth for a moment. Neither of them seem to share Marinette’s dark sense of humor.

Marinette frowns. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” she says carefully, but it comes out kind of wobbly and uncertain.

“We’re not upset, are we Michel?” Tom reassures immediately, and Michel shakes his head so hard his hair flops around like Adrien’s does sometimes when he’s being dramatic or silly. “Just, well, we only wish you weren’t forced to endure so much… hardship.”

Her spine goes a little more rigid, her shoulders squaring as she looks Tom right in the face. “I do what needs to be done to protect Paris and her people. You will always come first,” she says evenly, the words coming to her effortlessly. She lets her gaze flick up to meet Michel’s eyes, then a few of the other crew members who are clearly listening in on the conversation. “ _Always_.”

Tom’s eyes look suspiciously shiny for a moment and Marinette’s steely determination wobbles into something more unsure. He seems to gather himself, giving her a warm smile and saying, “Then, I want to say thank you, Chat Noir. From all of us. For everything you’ve done. And everything you’re doing.”

Marinette has no idea how to respond. She does her duty for Paris because she loves it, loves _them_ , but she has no idea what to do when the same energy is returned to her. She’s relieved from having to figure out what to say by a crew member further away pointing and calling out, “Ladybug’s back!”

Ladybug thumps onto the deck again, eyes locked to her.

“Hiya, Bug,” she manages feebly. Just seeing him, knowing he’s got her back, wrings out the remaining vestiges of her energy

He kneels down in front of her again. “Hiya, Minou,” he replies gently. “Ready to head out?”

“Sure.” She turns to Tom, handing him the mug. “Thanks again for the tea.”

Ladybug looks at the man like he’s just realizing he’s there. He blinks, then sticks out a hand. “Thank you, sir.”

“None of that,” Tom says, but he does shake Ladybug’s hand. “You two spend so much time looking after us. It’s time someone returned the favor.”

Adrien looks as dumbstruck as she feels.

“Still,” he insists.

“Thank you,” Marinette adds.

Tom beams at them.

* * *

It only takes her a few hours to start running fever.

“You, like, breathed in the Seine,” Adrien reasons. “It’s not exactly the cleanest water.”

“Haven’t I suffered enough?” Marinete whines, wriggling under her comforter. Tikki giggles across the room where she keeping watch at Marinette’s door.

Adrien tenses a little at the comment, and she watches him make an effort to smooth his face out.

“Sorry,” she mumbles.

He shakes his head, stiffness melting to fond exasperation. “What have I told you about apologizing?”

She shifts some more. “I know sometimes my… jokes upset you. I don’t mean it.”

“I know you don’t, Minou,” he says soothingly, pressing the cool rag to her forehead again. “Don’t worry about me. I’m a tough bug.”

“Not as tough as me,” she says petulantly, smiling when it makes him laugh.

“Right,” he agrees easily. “You’re much tougher than me. Need help with the makeup?”

“Yes, please,” she breathes.

It turns out, smashing face first into water from heights that make it basically concrete leave some intense marks. Adrien and especially Marinette aren’t always fully fixed up by the Cure. _Something, something magic,_ as Plagg so eloquently put it a few years earlier. Even aside from that, they heal much faster than a normal person would be able to. The bruises on Marinette’s face, then, are already a dark, mottled black and purple, but the swelling is practically gone. Adrien helps her cover up the bruises as best she can for when Nathalie comes to check on her.

“Pére is going to be pissed,” she mumbles as Adrien carefully dabs some color corrector on.

“For what?” he asks, his face pinched with concentration. It looks very cute and if she wasn’t sick and it wouldn’t smear off all of the makeup he’s carefully applying, she might have kissed him. “Being sick?”

“He’ll think I got it from school,” she complains. “He’ll probably threaten to pull me out again.”

Adrien pulls back, frowning. “Again?”

Marinette waves a hand, unconcerned. “He does it every so often, usually about something that’s out of my control. I don’t know, I think he just likes to remind me how much power he has over me. He can lock me back up whenever he wants.”

Adrien’s sitting back on his heels, looking deeply concerned. “Jesus, Mari.”

“It’s whatever,” Marinette dismisses.

He’s still frowning. “I knew your relationship with your pére wasn’t great, but… that’s, like, _awful_.”

It makes Marinette start to frown back. “I guess,” she agrees uncertainly. “He never follows through with it, or anything. I think he just likes to scare me.”

“I think that’s even worse,” Adrien says, his voice going tight.

“Well,” Marinette says, self-consciously curling in on herself a little. “There’s not much I can do about it, so…”

“Right,” Adrien deflates a little. His hand goes to rest on Marinette’s forearm. “I’m not – I just mean that it sucks. That he does that to you. I don’t like it.”

“I’m not a fan either,” Marinette mutters humorlessly, even as a smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. She gets that same, weird warmth she always does when Adrien does that – shows how much he cares about her.

“It’s not like it’d keep us apart anyway,” he says, much more cheerful, smiling again.

Marinette’s little grin grows wider. “Right,” she murmurs. That’s right.

Her temperature crawls higher very quickly, until she’s slumped over in bed while Adrien adds the finishing touches on her makeup, fixing any spot he’s missed.

“If I ever meet that water again,” Marinette grumbles feverishly, “I’m gonna beat its ass.”

Adrien moves his hand back to laugh. “Like, the whole river?”

“Maybe,” Marinette says mulishly. “You don’t know. I’ll Cataclysm the whole river, see if I give a fuck.”

Adrien laughs some more. “I’m sure you would, Mari.”

* * *

She doesn’t go to school for two days and it’s _torturous_. All she can do it lie in bed, text her friends when they can sneak their phones out, and scroll through twitter.

(She tries napping, but she jerks awake ever half hour from terrible nightmares that she can’t remember. She’s not sure she wants to remember.)

Twitter is flooded with videos from lots of angles showing her smashing into the water. She feels a sick sort of vindication that it looks as painful as it felt. She can’t find any clips of Ladybug up close, but she can see the way he gets frantic even from a distance, wielding a spotted traffic cone to set up an elaborate trap for the akuma.

She was under the water for two and a half minutes.

She’s not sure if it felt that long. She can’t remember much of it at all really, which is probably a blessing.

(Except _the pressure,_ that new, awful part of her brains whispers, _that let you smother, suffocate, if only you hadn’t been so slow to move, to swim, to live –)_

She does remember getting hauled up onto Tom’s boat like a dead fish, though, and there’s footage of that as well, if only from the shore. They even capture Ladybug flitting in for a few seconds, then dashing off the boat to return a few minutes later.

Then, she stumbles on a tweet.

> **GOD’S PERFECT FISHBOY** @Michelmichel
> 
> um hello everyone i met chat noir and she was so cute and nice and sweet i WAS prepared to burst into tears and fight any akuma that came near her or ladybug, who was equally cute and sweet

It’s, like, _actually_ Michel from the boat, and the tweet makes her laugh. She switches to her Chat Noir account, likes the tweet, and follows him.

> **Brat Noir** @notacatgirl
> 
> @Michelmichel thank you for your service, king

It takes only seconds to get the notification of his reply.

> **GOD’S PERFECT FISHBOY** @Michelmichel
> 
> @notacatgirl HEJRKGAHGKKAHGAJERJNVKAJVN
> 
> **GOD’S PERFECT FISHBOY** @Michelmichel
> 
> @notacatgirl CAHTONIOTI CHAT NORI CJUST FOLLWEOD ME
> 
> **GOD’S PERFECT FISHBOY** @Michelmichel
> 
> @notacatgirl im going to cry i love you
> 
> **Brat Noir** @notacatgirl
> 
> @Michelmichel that tea you made me? chef’s kiss, bro
> 
> **GOD’S PERFECT FISHBOY** @Michelmichel
> 
> @notacatgirl im putting this tweet on my gravestone

Adrien texts her a few minutes later with just a frowny face. She sends forty hearts of all colors and it shifts to a smiley.

Jealous bug.

* * *

Alya, Nino, and Adrien come visit her on her third, likely final day of staying home sick. The insane bruising on her face has finally faded, only faint traces of yellow lingering around her eye that she can dismiss as caused by her illness.

Adrien bursts through her door first, bounding over and flopping onto the other side of her bed with a sigh, making himself at home. Marinette’s laugh sounds weird and nasally, but he grins up at her anyway.

Alya and Nino enter slightly more sedately, but they both look excited to see her as well. Nino drags the chair from her desk over while Alya sits at the foot of the bed.

“Tell me everything fun that’s happened,” Marinette demands. Adrien flops his head into her lap and she pets his hair. “I’m _bored_.”

“Yeah, how tragic that you got to escape school for three days,” Nino teases good naturedly.

Marinette’s smile goes a little brittle and she looks down at Adrien in her lap. He’s looking back up at her evenly, canting his head to nuzzle into her hands some more. He’s the only person she’s ever told that school – her _friends_ – are really, truly, the best parts of her life, that she dreads weekends locked up in her empty, cold house, trying to catch her father’s attention for moments at a time. School _is_ her escape.

But she’s not trying to be a drag now.

“It was a relief not to listen to Chloe speak for a while,” she says, mock thoughtfulness on her face. “I feel like I’ve recovered some braincells.”

Nino snickers while Alya gives her a wicked grin. Adrien rolls his eyes so hard his whole head moves.

“She’s been surprisingly tame the last few days,” Adrien says, wriggling so he’s on his belly and can face the other two easier. “Without her most admirable foe, she gets bored easily.”

Marinette rolls her eyes. “I just have years of practice dealing with her. I’m better at it.”

“The fact that you were childhood friends blows my mind,” Alya says, tapping out something on her phone. “It’s like a plot twist every time I hear it.”

Marinette sighs. “She wasn’t so bad when we were kids.” Marinette learned to tolerate Chloe’s bossiness, and Chloe learned that Marinette wouldn’t be so easily bossed, and they’d struck a kind of balance.

“Now you’re mortal enemies,” Nino says dramatically, pressing a fist to his puffed out chest. “Fated to clash as foes forevermore.”

Marinette snorts. “We’ve been enemies longer than friends, at this point,” she mumbles a little sourly. It was mostly after Marinette’s mother disappeared. Her patience went way down, and her surliness wasn’t well received by Chloe. Their careful balance was disrupted, and they were never the same again.

(Marinette would never admit this, maybe not even to Adrien, but sometimes… she misses the friendship they shared. How easy it was, how well they knew each other, how attuned they had been to each other’s feelings. It’s what makes their clashes now so intense – they _know_ each other, even after all this time.)

Adrien makes a little noise of contemplation. “You guys could always make up,” he suggests.

Alya snorts, but Marinette looks down at him suspiciously. He beams back up at her. His endless positivity would be exhausting if it wasn’t exactly what she needed to balance out her gloominess. Of _course_ he would want her to make up with Chloe. She doesn’t even need to admit her thoughts for him to understand.

“Easier said than done,” Alya says, eyes still glued to her screen.

Marinette frowns at her. She’s not normally so inattentive when they’re all talking together. “What are you doing?”

Alya finally looks up, a grin lighting up her face that means it has something to do with Ladybug and Chat Noir. “I’m interviewing this guy on twitter right now.”

Marinette blinks, then looks down at Adrien, who blinks back up at her. “Like, right now, right now?”

“Yeah,” Alya replies casually, typing away again. “He was on the boat that fished Chat Noir out of the Seine.” Then she cuts her eyes back up. “That was not an intentional pun.”

“Wasn’t very good anyway,” Adrien says haughtily, turning his nose up.

“Anyway, he’s telling me about Chat Noir right after they pulled her up,” Alya goes on, her grin slipping to something a little more somber. “He says it was awful at first, but then she was making _them_ feel better, joking around and stuff. Gave this epic speech about her duty to Paris and its people that made their captain cry.”

Adrien cocks his head to raise an eyebrow at Marinette, who raises a hand to scrub at her eyes and hide her blush. “It wasn’t _epic_ ,” she mumbles, and Adrien shakes with suppressed laughter.

Alya, not hearing, presses on. “Says her fortitude really impressed him. Took it like a champ.”

“It?” Marinette echoes, that now-familiar hollow feeling in her gut sucking her embarrassed amusement away.

Alya looks uncertain then. “Well, y’know…” she trails off uncertainly, waving her hand in a vague motion.

“Drowning?” Nino suggests, his voice very quiet. Adrien goes very still in Marinette’s lap.

“It’s only called drowning if they… die,” Alya says carefully.

“She probably did,” Marinette says without meaning to. They all turn to look at her, Adrien’s eyes burning hot into the underside of her jaw, but if she looks back at him, she might cry. She looks at Alya instead. “She was down there a while. The Cure probably brought her back. She came back up after it.” She shifts her glance over to Nino, and, in an effort not to sound so certain, tacks on a slightly more unsure sounding, “Right?”

“She hit the water so hard,” Nino adds with a frown. “It must’ve made her… confused.”

(Except it wasn’t the impact so much as the _pressure, bearing down on her chest, and she couldn’t breathe, like the electrocution, crushing the air out of her –)_

Silence follows for a few seconds, and with each thump of her heartbeat, Marinette feels more likely to – to do _something_ , maybe scream or cry or laugh to break it before that ugly voice in her head comes back.

“Either way,” Alya says decisively, and the confidence in her tone relieves the hysteria that started to wind its way through Marinette. The whole group seems to let out a breath. “Chat Noir is okay. This guy says she was cracking jokes and Ladybug was babying her, so she’s okay.”

“Babying is a strong word,” Adrien mumbles, his voice sounding a little hoarse. She still can’t look at him, but she does reach out to touch his hair again.

“His words, not mine,” Alya says playfully, looking back down at her screen. The uneasiness that hung over the group is dispelled by her levity, and it’s suddenly a little easier to breathe.

“I’m hungry,” Adrien decides, sitting up and forcing Marinette to meet his eyes.

There’s a faint tinge of pink around them, like he was trying hard not to tear up, but he gives her a warm little smile and squeezes her hand gently. When the corner of her mouth twitches upwards, his smile grows a little wider, and he leans in to peck her on the cheek.

“I’ll bring you up some soup,” he says easily, the intimate little moment passing as he kicks a foot out at Nino. “Come help me bring snacks.”

Nino lights up. “Mari, do you have those American crackers?”

Marinette rolls her eyes. “Help yourself, Nino.”

“Bring me some!” Alya demands, and the fact that she looks up from her phone to demand it means she’s very serious.

Nino laughs. “Sure, babe,” he says, pecking her on the cheek and grinning when she turns back to her phone with a grunt.

Adrien reaches out and presses a hand to Marinette’s ankle through her blanket. Even without actual contact, it floods Marinette with feelings of warmth and comfort.

“Be right back,” he whispers, then follows Nino through the door.

“Those dumb boys,” Alya says affectionately.

“ _Our_ dumb boys,” Marinette corrects fondly.

She’s grateful to have them.

Even when they crash back into her room and Nino gets crackers in her bed and Adrien somehow manages to get soup on _everyone_ , she laughs and thinks about how her bedroom is more full of life and love than it has been in years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chat noir: haha i died, hilarious am i right
> 
> tom and michel: i dont like this
> 
> ladybug: please stop
> 
> all of paris: this is awful
> 
> chat noir: lol classic


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fourth time Marinette dies, it’s in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is uhh twice as long as the previous ones. sorry for the wait lads, the worlds a shitshow yknow.

The fourth time Marinette dies, it’s in the dark.

Not, like, literally, it’s actually midmorning, but the akuma, Blackout, has rendered Chat Noir fully blind. She’s been slow, sluggish – not sleeping well. She’s not even surprised when the weird bolt of darkness hits her square in the face.

It’s bizarrely claustrophobic. She’s never been afraid of the dark before, but now, suddenly, she understands the fear.

“Chat!” Ladybug slams into her and keeps her tucked under his arm as they zip across the warehouse. At least, for once, there’s no press to watch. She’s sick of watching her own death make headlines, and she has an ominous, dreadful feeling that this is the direction it’s heading in.

They land and she scrabbles to keep her feet under her, letting Ladybug manhandle her to what she assumes is a safe position. Without her sight, she feels lost and disoriented.

_(Like having your head smashed open on the roof, your brain spilling out of your skull, unable to move, to think–)_

“I’m alright,” she reassures, her voice shakier than she means it to be. “I’m – I’m good. She just got me. I can’t see.”

“Oh,” Adrien groans fretfully, touching her face for a moment. “Sorry, Minou.”

“No, _I’m_ sorry.” She frowns, tilting her head where she thinks Adrien’s face is. “I won’t be much help now.”

“It’s alright,” Ladybug reassures. “We know the akuma’s in her sunglasses. I’ll… figure something out.”

He sounds uneasy; it makes her frown. She reaches out, hands bumping him awkwardly until she can hold his shoulders firmly. “You’ve got this, Bugaboo. You’ve taken out hundreds of akumas by now. You barely even need little old me.”

“Of _course_ I need you,” he insists, his voice so earnest that it makes her cheeks grow warm.

Pure muscle memory allows her to reach up and push his face away playfully. “Just go save the day, you sap.”

“Okay,” he says, still sounding hesitant. She tries her best to fix him with a pointed stare. “Okay,” he says again, laughter in his voice. “Wait here.”

“Not exactly mobile right now,” she grumbles, folding down to sit on the ground, back against something hard.

She doesn’t hear him leave, but she can still feel it in a way. When they’re in the suits, they practically have a sixth sense about where their partner is, and it’s started to bleed into their civilian lives as well. It drives Alya _insane_.

She listens to the battle anxiously, fingers working nervously at the zipper of her jacket. The fight grows closer, then further, then closer, then further again and she feels like she’s going to rip her hair out for how useless she feels.

Something above her cracks loudly. She barely scrabbles to her feet when things come crashing down on her. She can’t see what they are, or feel the material through her gloves, but it must be steel or concrete for how hard it bears down on her. It flattens her to the ground in an instant, pressing the air out of her. When they’re in the suits they’re strong – like, _insanely_ strong. But even the tentative push she gives the rubble makes it shift ominously, so she stops.

_“Chat!”_ she can hear faintly, but she can’t suck in a breath to call back out. Her airway feels thin and fragile. What minimal air she’s getting isn’t enough to keep up with her thundering heart. She tries desperately to activate Catacylsm, but without any air, she can’t call it out.

It’s terrifying and panic-inducing, but she does her best to keep from freaking out. She’s pinned and her head is spinning from the lack of oxygen, but she’ll be okay. She just has to wait for Ladybug to win. A few minutes, tops. She can make it.

It’s hard to tell, though, how much time is passing. She tries counting, but her head grows foggy and she can’t really remember what number she’s on suddenly. But Ladybug will be there soon.

The rubble shifts, suddenly, crushing her even more and if she had the strength she’s sure she would be crying now. She can’t manage the breath for it. What little oxygen she was getting has vanished. She’s pinned. _Trapped._

Panic sets in, her heart feeling moments from bursting out of her chest, her head floating away, away, away…

Something grabs her and she flails hard, desperate to escape, shoving it away as blood roars in her ears. She finally realizes she can see and stops only when she sees Adrien’s face. Even occluded by the mask, it levels her head.

“You’re okay,” he promises, his hands held out carefully. He’s not touching her. Unusual.

But, Marinette thinks, panting and flopping onto her back again, she’s pretty sure she just smacked him a few times while she woke up. Her head is still swimming, like she’s catching up on all the oxygen she missed.

“I have to recharge,” Adrien murmurs. “Do you want me to –”

He can’t even finish the sentence before Marinette has a hand locked around his wrist.

“Okay,” he soothes. He cranes his neck to look around and make sure they’re alone. “Spots off.”

“Marinette!” Tikki cries the moment she appears. “Oh, Marinette. Not again.”

Something about the way she says it, a weird mix of concern and exasperation, almost makes Marinette laugh. Maybe Tikki has asked Plagg for tips on how to cheer her up immediately post-mortem.

Or was it _post_ -post-mortem?

“Here, Tikki.” Adrien holds out the macaron, leaning over Marinette again. “Okay?”

Marinette nods, feeling dazed, trying not to so desperately suck in air. Finally, she says, “I made it five months without dying again. New record.”

Adrien’s mouth warps into a grimace, but she can’t muster the energy to apologize. Thankfully, his face smooths out quickly and he says, “Actually, I think the record was ages fourteen to sixteen.”

“S’not my fault the akumas are getting meaner,” Marinette wheezes.

Adrien reaches up and smooths Marinette’s hair back from her face with a sad, little smile. “You’re right. Can you sit up?”

It takes a minute, but they slowly get her from prone on the ground to tentatively standing on her feet.

( _She’s useless without him,_ _pathetic–)_

“I’m ready,” Tikki chirps, floating up to rest on Adrien’s shoulder.

“Okay,” Adrien nods. “Spots on.”

Marinette focuses on her breathing, trying not to feel so wobbly. She still feels a strange weight on her chest. Maybe it’s psychosomatic. Possibly her sternum is still cracked.

“You okay to get home?” Concern wrinkles Adrien’s mask. She’s going to give him crow’s feet by twenty at this rate.

“I won’t be setting any speed records,” she admits. “Or… style records. But I can manage.”

“My place?” Ladybug asks, offering a hand to help haul her to the roof.

“Mine,” she breathes, trying not to look like she’s barely keeping her balance. She doesn’t want any footage of her being carried across Paris. For once, her death will go without speculation in the press; she wants to keep it that way. “My pére left for a work trip a couple hours ago. He’ll be gone a few days.”

“Nice!” Ladybug crows, perhaps a little too cheerfully. His wicked grin is in full force, though. “House party?”

It makes her laugh so hard she has to clutch onto him so she won’t fall.

* * *

There’s bruising again this time. She hadn’t felt it in her arms and legs, really, but the ones sprawling across her chest aren’t surprising in the least. She was probably right about her sternum still being cracked. Maybe even her clavicle and a few ribs. She sighs as she stares in the mirror, practically watching her skin turn a mottling dark blue before her eyes. She painfully pulls a big hoodie over her head and shuffles out of the bathroom.

Adrien’s sprawled across her couch, flipping between DVDs. “D’you wanna watch Spirited Away or Kiki’s Delivery Service?”

Marinette hesitates, looking over at her huge, inviting bed. Apparently, she thinks wrily, dying really takes it out of a girl.

“Is it alright if we nap?” she suggests tentatively.

The DVDs are dropped instantly as he flips over the back of the couch. “Love naps!” he effuses, then his face drops to a look of utter betrayal. “My Sailor Moon hoodie!” he cries, pointing right at her like she’s unsure what he’s referring to.

She sniffs, turning her nose up and flopping onto her bed, turned from him so she can hide her wince at the impact. “It’s soft,” is her only defense.

“I’ve been looking for that,” he grumbles, but he crawls into bed with her anyway.

She’s glad he’s here. The nightmares aren’t as intense if he stays with her.

He’s saying something to her now, but she’s already drifting to sleep.

* * *

Her dream is strange, winding, and unpleasant. The pressure, always the pressure, bears down on her chest, leaving her feeling like she’s wound up, suffocating, _dying–_

“Marinette!” Adrien’s hovering above her with concern. “It’s alright, it was just a dream.”

Her breathing is still ragged, and she realizes her muscles are wound painfully tight.

_(Just like when you got electrocuted, drawn taut, excruciatingly–)_

She claps her hands over her ears in a futile attempt to block out the thought.

“Hey!” Adrien yelps, grabbing her wrists like she’s going to smash her hands against her head again (and she might). “Hey, you’re okay!”

“I was just…” she starts defensively but lets herself trail off. She doesn’t know what to say, how to explain the insidious little voice that’s taken up residence in the back of her mind, spitefully reminding her about her suffering, her agony, at all times of the day.

“It was just a bad dream,” he soothes, pulling her hands away from her head to cradle them. “Deep breaths.”

It’s _not_ just a bad dream she gets the strange urge to snarl, it’s infecting her _brain,_ but she does her best to follow his instructions, only so he’ll stop looking like a kicked puppy. She hates when his eyes get so big and sad.

“I’ll grab you some water,” he says, moving in that frantic way he does when he’s trying really hard to help. He basically swats the water bottle on her nightstand right off the bed, along with a few other things, and she can feel a little smile tug at the corners of her mouth as he swears and fumbles out of bed to pick them all up.

He picks them up hastily, one at a time. The water bottle, some chapstick, a tissue box, and – oh, _shit_.

Her prescription strength sleeping pills.

Nathalie had gotten them for her without comment after the over the counter pills weren’t effective. Plopped them right on the breakfast table with her oatmeal and carried on without comment. Marinette’s not sure how she even knew. She doesn’t scream in her nightmares. She never has the breath.

Adrien’s frozen, staring at the label with a frown. She’s sitting up in bed now, watching him warily.

He looks up at her finally, his face strangely unreadable in a way that makes Marinette very nervous. “What are these?”

Mostly as a way to stall for time, she says, “Promise you won’t get upset.”

His brow crinkles. He’s still holding the bottle delicately. “You have to know that’s a worrisome thing to say to me.”

Marinette sighs, shame curling in her gut as she looks away. “They’re… sleeping pills.”

“For what?” he asks warily.

“Well,” her mouth moves while her brain struggles for an answer, “sometimes, when people can’t sleep, they go to a doctor and–”

_“Marinette_ ,” he cuts her off, his voice much sharper than usual. She flinches away and he softens. “Why are you taking them?”

The silence hangs in between them. They both know the answer. It’s obvious. But he’s watching her now, waiting for her to say it. Admit it.

Her gaze falls to her lap, her hands twisting into each other. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping.”

Adrien’s voice is as soft as hers now. “For how long?”

She breathes out a slow, shaky breath. She already knows he’ll be upset. “Since the first time.” She doubts she’ll need to elaborate.

She’s right. He shifts to his feet again, pacing a few steps from the bed. “God damn it,” he mutters. “God _damn_ it, Mari.”

“I know,” she mumbles. The guilt festers uncomfortably in her stomach.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” he demands. He looks more hurt than angry, tears shining in his eyes. It makes her stomach clench harder. “It’s been nine months since the first time you – since it happened.”

“I didn’t want to worry you,” she mutters weakly. It sounds lame to her own ears. It’s because she didn’t want to be _weak and helpless and–_ she shuts her eyes tight for a moment and balls her fists in her lap to keep from clapping her hands over her ears again.

Adrien gives her a fiery look when she opens her eyes again. “I’m your _partner_ ,” he says firmly. “That means we _share_ the load. We help each other.”

“I know,” she says miserably. She feels like her stomach is going to curl in so tight on itself it vanishes entirely. She hopes it takes the rest of her with it and she can just curl up tighter and tighter until she’s gone entirely.

“I should’ve known,” he groans suddenly, turning to pace and press his own hands to his head. “I knew something was off after that night. It’s _been_ off. And it just keeps _happening_.”

It takes a moment for her to realize what he’s implying, and then indignation flares hot, briefly overtaking the misery clouding her thoughts. “I’m sorry,” she snaps. “What, do you think I’m just throwing myself to my death at every opportunity?”

Adrien stops and pins her in her place with his gaze. He doesn’t look angry at all anymore. Upset, maybe. _Wounded_ in some way she doesn’t understand. She hates the way his mouth is twisted down into a strange grimace. “Sometimes I wonder.”

The silence hangs between them again and Marinette tries not to feel like she’s been slapped. Adrien looks uncomfortable for the first time. Like he regrets saying it. But he makes no move to take it back.

It’s not like the idea is – is so far out of the realm of her imagination, okay? Maybe, maybe, if things were different, if she’d never met Plagg and never went to school and made friends and met Adrien when she was fourteen, then maybe she could see where he was coming from. She was a sad kid, she’s self-aware enough to grasp that, miserable and lonely and hurting, but she can’t believe he’d think, even _consider_ that she’d do something like that to him. That she would leave him like that on _purpose_.

The thought tumbles out. “You think I would do that to you?” She means to demand it, but it comes out weak.

Adrien starts, thrown. “What?”

“That I would,” she pauses, struggling for the words. They’re all jumbled in her mind now, slipping between her fingers. “That I would do that to myself in front of you? Intentionally… force you to watch? Do you really think I’m so selfish?”

Adrien’s shoulders hike up to his shoulders: his classic defensive posture. “No, I – I know you wouldn’t want to hurt me.” His tone goes reedy. His eyes shift around rapidly, flitting from her to his feet to other spots in the room, suddenly unable to look her in the eye.

“I wouldn’t,” she implores, her anger draining quickly, replaced with a weird, fuzzy desperation. Like she needs him to understand. To _believe_ her. “I wouldn’t just _leave_ you like that. Not if I can help it.”

Adrien looks like _he’s_ been slapped now. He’s finally looking at her again. “No, I – I know, Mari. I know you wouldn’t.”

“Then don’t say that,” she demands. Her voice cracks and she can suddenly feel the hot tears slipping down her cheeks. Even though its unfair, she tacks on, “Don’t even _think_ it.”

Adrien nods, his hair flopping into his eyes as he moves back to kneel by the bed, holding her hands where they’re balled into painful fists in her lap, nails biting into the meat of her palm. “I won’t,” he promises, voice cracking.

“I _didn’t_ ,” she insists, the pressure inn her chest worsening. Her voice keeps getting thinner, strained, almost frantic as she pleads with him, with herself. “I didn’t want to – not any of the times it’s happened.”

“You didn’t,” Adrien agrees, his own voice going wobbly. “Of _course_ you didn’t. I shouldn’t have said that. It was cruel.”

Her head is swirling. Adrien’s looking at her with naked concern on his face and it’s suddenly too much for her to bear. Her voice comes out faint. “I didn’t want to die, Adrien.”

He doesn’t say anything, just folds her into his arms while the pressure in her chest finally bursts. She thinks she’s crying, but she sinks against him, feeling like all vitality is sucked away from her, like she’s just a hollow shell, a facsimile of a person, with nothing inside of her to make her _real_. But Adrien’s holding her, keeping her from just drifting away into nothingness.

(Like she wishes she could.)

* * *

She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but when she wakes up, the early morning sun is streaming through her window.

Adrien’s not there.

She presses her face into her pillow and breathes very carefully. She really doesn’t want to cry anymore. She’s done it so often lately, and she must have completely cried herself to sleep in Adrien’s arms. Just thinking about it makes that familiar sick feeling crawl up her throat, embarrassment clenching her throat. It’s ridiculous, and she knows, logically, realistically, that Adrien would never pity her or think her weak or anything of the sort, but – _but._

She’s had training on maintaining a public façade since she was young. After Maman was gone, they only increased, Pére doubling down to keep the public from preying on them in the wake of his wife’s disappearance. Showing such brazen emotion was _unbecoming_ , especially something as undignified as the sniveling she’d done all night.

So she _knows_ Adrien would never judge her. It’s just sort of hard to believe when she’s been so deeply trained to believe otherwise.

“Kid? You up?”

She rolls over to look at Plagg, who’s hovering over her with what she can faintly detect as concern. She nods.

“Your bug went to get breakfast from his bakery,” Plagg tells her. She tries not to deflate with relief at the news, but it’s not like she can hide her feelings from Plagg. Not when they’re bonded. Sharing with Plagg is always less humiliating than anyone else, though. Marinette can take it. “He’ll be back soon, probably.”

“Thanks,” she mumbles, trying to uncurl on herself. She feels weak. Vulnerable.

He settles on the comforter, staring up at her with unblinking eyes. It should probably be eerie, but she just stares back, blinking slowly.

“Quite the blowout you had last night,” Plagg says bluntly.

Marinette groans, pressing her face to her hands to smother her humiliation, her frustration. “Don’t remind me.”

“Never seen him so mad before,” he continues as if she never spoke. “He said some shitty things.”

Even as her own uncertain resentment lingers, Marinette can’t help but scowl, defensiveness rising. “He was upset,” she snaps. “He’s the one who keeps watching me die all the time.”

“And you’re the one who keeps actually dying,” Plagg counters calmly. “He could stand to have a little empathy.”

“He’s got _plenty_ of empathy,” she snarls, sitting up in bed to glare at him. “More than I’ve got, probably. Definitely more than _you’ve_ got.”

“Oh sure,” Plagg agrees easily, looking unphased in the face of Marinette’s anger. “He just picked a hell of a time to be selfish.”

“He’s not,” Marinette’s practically choking around her rage, “ _selfish.”_

“He made one of my kits cry because he was feeling upset,” Plagg drawls, still looking calm. Suspiciously calm. _Strangely_ calm.

Marinette’s anger still simmers hot, but she breathes heavily for a moment, staring at her kwami. “What are you doing?” she demands finally.

He fixes her with a bland look that doesn’t fool her for a second. “What do you mean?”

“Why are you doing this? Saying these things? Are you just trying to make me angry?”

Plagg looks at her, somehow sympathetic and unimpressed all at once. “You’ve got plenty of anger in you already kid. I don’t have to make you nothing.”

The anger does fester, hot and sickening under her skin, so easily called to the forefront. Of course she’s angry. She’s always angry, really, always has been, for years, since before she met Plagg, since her mother vanished, probably. She hates it though, the way it makes her feel fragile and out of control, and the way that hatred only fuels the anger even more, like an awful cycle that she doesn’t know how to break.

“You gotta let it out sometime, kid,” Plagg says, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “It’ll eat you up. I’ve lost a lot of kits that way. I’m not ready for a new one now.”

The anger cools and settles again, guilt flooding her veins with ice. “I don’t know how to make it go away,” she admits quietly. “If I let it out, it just… keeps coming. Like I’ll never run out.”

“You should tell someone,” Plagg advises. “Not just the anger. All of it. The things that hurt you. They’re easier to bear when you have help.” For once he actually sounds like the millennia-old entity he promises he is, guiding her like he said he would.

(But that’s not quite fair. Plagg _has_ guided her, from when she was a gawky, angry, young teenage girl, helping her grow in ways that she could never have hoped. She wishes she knew how to thank him for it.)

“I’m telling you,” she protests weakly, but she knows what he means.

“You’re partners. You give each other balance. It’s why you were chosen,” Plagg says. He turns his head for a moment in a way that means Ladybug is approaching. A moment later, Marinette feels it, too.

“Talk,” is all Plagg says, then he floats over to hover near Marinette’s giant closet, ready to tug Tikki away to give them privacy.

Ladybug appears in her window seconds later, looking windswept and tired and lovely.

“Spots off,” he murmurs, giving Marinette a timid smile.

Tikki flits across the room quickly, hugging Marinette’s cheek with a gleeful squeak that sparks genuine joy beneath Marinette’s collarbone.

“Hi, Tikki,” she mumbles.

“Hi, Marinette!” Tikki replies cheerfully. Marinette wonders, suddenly, what it would be like to be on a receiving end of a talk like the one she just got from Plagg from Tikki instead. It’s a strange thought.

“C’mon, Tikki, let’s give the kids some breathing room,” Plagg says drily, surprisingly tactful for once. Tikki looks between the two holders, then flits away without another word.

It’s just Marinette and Adrien now.

An odd tension hangs in the air between them. They’ve never really fought before. Neither of them quite know how to bridge the gap.

“Hi,” Adrien says finally.

“Hi.”

He lifts the bag in his hand, _Agreste Bakery_ scrawled in loopy handwriting that Marinette knows belongs to his mother. “Brought your favorite. Told Maman you weren’t feeling well. She insisted I bring extra.”

“Thanks,” Marinette whispers, and it’s all the invitation Adrien needs to make his way over, still a little hesitant, and sit on her bed next to her.

It’s a weird jumble of feelings in Marinette’s chest. That her boyfriend’s mother expressed so much concern, knew her favorite pastry, wanted to care for her even from a distance. She’s had no word from her pére since his terse goodbye the day before.

“Can I ask you something?” she blurts suddenly.

Adrien pauses only a moment from his unloading of croissants and quiches before resuming. “Of course, Mari.”

She has to muster up the courage to spit out her question. Adrien waits patiently, carefully arranging the pastries, eyes locked onto his fingers. She’s not sure she deserves him.

“Do your parents say ‘I love you’ a lot?”

That draws his gaze up to her, but now she can’t look at him. Her fingers twist together in her lap, picking at her cuticles in the way Nathalie always scolds her for. The back of her neck grows hot. What a stupid question. She’s _heard_ his parents speak to each other, to him. She doesn’t even need to ask.

“All the time,” he confirms quietly. “Why do ask?”

Marinette gives a feeble shrug, her head tipping back so she can stare at the ceiling and blink back the traitorous tears starting to burn her eyes. She lets out a shuddery sigh, trying to swallow the lump in her throat.

“I dunno,” she manages finally. “It’s dumb.”

“It’s not,” Adrien disagrees gently. She cant see, but she feels his hand press to her knee, warm and comforting. “Tell me.”

“I was trying to remember the last time Pére said it to me,” she says in a rush, spitting it all out before she could stop herself.

“Oh,” Adrien says quietly. It’s barely audible. She’s not sure what it means.

“When he left yesterday, he said goodbye, and I said it to him, but he didn’t say… but he never does when he leaves for trips.” The silence lingers between them, then the words come even faster, tumbling out of her mouth like they’ve been waiting to escape. “I try to tell him whenever I see him, but he usually just says to behave or gives me my schedule or… I thought – maybe last year, for my birthday, but he was in London, then, so maybe, um, the year before that, and he might’ve but I don’t… remember.” Marinette swallows hard. Her words echo strangely in her giant room. “I don’t remember.”

“Marinette,” Adrien murmurs. Now she can hear the distress, the despair. It’s hard to hear.

“I told you,” she breathes shakily, finally letting her head tilt forward again to look at Adrien. His eyes are shiny. It makes her lip tremble and she has to bite it for a second to make it stop. “It’s dumb.”

Adrien shakes his head vehemently. “It’s not dumb,” he insists. He looks equal parts determined and upset. He moves to hold her hands, gently, easing the fists they’ve curled into, sweeping over the crescents her nails have carved into them. “It’s the least dumb thing in the world. I’m sorry, Mari.”

Marinette smiles, reaching out and pressing a hand to his face. His big, dumb, green eyes are shining brightly. “Don’t say sorry,” she says softly. “You’re the best thing I’ve got.”

He gives her a big wobbly smile. “You _do_ have me. I love you.”

The words warm her from the inside out. It almost makes the hurt tolerable. “I love you, too.”

* * *

Of course, it’s all over twitter by the time they go to school on Monday.

There are videos of Chat Noir and Ladybug after the fact, and she tries not to wince at the way she hobbles across rooftops, accepting more help from Ladybug than she’d like the public to see. Most pressingly, though, are the pictures of the attack.

The building, mostly collapsed, one of her feet sticking out of the rubble. Ladybug, perched next to it, looking shaken.

_(You were smothered down there. Crushed, your own bones pressing down on your organs, squeezing every pitiful, tragic bit of life from your weak frame–_ )

She replies to one of the pictures.

> **Brat Noir** @notacatgirl
> 
> @brumptypoo why my foot look like that. why is my trauma hilarious looking im pissed
> 
> **Miss Anne Tifa** @brumptypoo
> 
> @notacatgirl NOOOOO IM SO SORRY THAT MADE ME LAUGH JSKLDNFBJSLGLGSFK
> 
> **Ladybruh** @miraculousspots
> 
> @notacatgirl i am going to skin you if you don’t sTOP

She sheepishly puts her phone away, glancing up at Adrien who pointedly does not look back down at her.

“So much for not having that one documented,” she mumbles.

He looks down then, sliding his phone in his pocket as they enter their classroom. His face is much more sympathetic than his tweet was. “At least they’re only pictures,” he says reassuringly.

“Feet pics,” Marinette sighs sadly. “My reputation is tarnished.”

“Is it feet pics if it’s only one foot?” Adrien wonders aloud as they sit down.

“Yes,” Nino answers decisively, then frowns. “Wait, I didn’t like how sure I sounded. Let me try again.” He clears his throat. “Yes?”

“Are we talking about Chat Noir?” Alya asks eagerly, dropping into her seat.

“Aren’t we always?” Adrien drawls exaggeratedly, rolling his eyes dramatically. He yelps when Alya reaches out and pinches his nose.

“Yes, as we _should_ be,” she insists. Marinette openly points and laughs at him when Alya releases him, immune to his pout. “I mean, dang, that’s number four, y’know?”

Adrien scowls immediately as Marinette’s good humor slips away. “Jesus, Alya,” he scolds.

Alya barely looks contrite, but she does offer a shrug and a weak, “Sorry, but…”

“We don’t know that she died,” Marinette defends weakly. She crams her hands under her legs so she doesn’t dig at her already bloody cuticles – it’s been a stressful few days.

“Four that we _know_ of,” Nino says instead, voice ringing ominously. “I’m sure there’s a couple times they’ve gotten really hurt when no one can see.”

“I dunno,” Alya muses. “The akumas are kind of getting more violent as time goes on. Escalating, y’know? Plus, it’s not like these have all happened in a month.”

“True,” Nino nods. “It’s been like a year since the first one.”

“Nine months,” Alya and Adrien say in unison, then stare at each other a moment.

Alya gets a shit eating grin on her face. “Knew that off the top of your head, huh? Don’t think I’ve forgotten your Chat Noir stan days.”

“What can I say?” Adrien deadpans. “I love a good catgirl.”

Alya wrinkles her nose immediately while Nino groans. Marinette levels a glare at him. “I’m breaking up with you.”

Adrien melts into his seat dramatically with a drawn out, _“Noooo.”_

Alya pinches his nose again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> marinette is FINALLY starting to open up at least a little to adrien who desperately wants nothing more than to support her :( shes got TRAUMA bro shes doing her best. 
> 
> one more chapter before everything really comes to a head. the kids arent alright but they will be eventually.

**Author's Note:**

> so as you may have gathered, this is less of a kwami swap and more of a full life swap. this, i think, will have lots of repercussions on the story and marinette and adrien's personalities and friendships that i'll briefly touch on but im too dumb to really get into it so scraps are all we get girlies
> 
> there'll be more expanding on these ideas in later chapters, though. poor mari has lots of bads times to experience ahead :( please feel free to message me on tumblr at [ bugandchatboo ](https://bugandchatboo.tumblr.com/) i have. SO many thoughts and feelings about these children and this au in particular


End file.
